Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #29 (“Erlangen”)

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m pleased to announce the May 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #29 “Erlangen”. Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the May 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named after a Perl Mongers group. The May 2010 release is code named “Erlangen” in recognition of Erlangen.pm and the Perl 6 talk that Moritz Lenz, one of our core developers, gave this month.

Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this release include:

* Lexical classes and roles were implemented. Additionally, anonymous classes — which were never quite right in alpha — are now implemented more correctly, and anonymous roles are also supported.

* Basic support for named enumerations of the form ‘enum Weekday ‘ has been restored.

* First cut of use Foo:from and eval(‘foo’, :lang); needs Blizkost[1] to be installed to work.

* Numeric / Real roles much closer to the spec now.

* As always, many additional small features and bug fixes make working with Rakudo more pleasant.

* Rakudo now passes 32,347 spectests. We estimate that there are about 39,500 tests in the test suite, so Rakudo passes about 82% of all tests.

For a more detailed list of changes see “docs/ChangeLog”.

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible, as well as those people who worked on parrot, the Perl 6 test suite and the specification.

The next release of Rakudo (#30) is scheduled for June 17, 2010. A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2010 is available in the “docs/release_guide.pod” file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each
Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.